Sly Saint

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Trial By Error: What Is the Dynamic Neural Retraining System? 2 September 2020 David Tuller

The Lightning Process, which I have covered extensively, isn’t the only program out there making big assertions about its impact on how the brain functions. These assertions piggyback on the emerging science of neuroplasticity and related concepts and involve the brain’s capacity to generate new neural pathways when it adapts to changes in stimuli. The existence of that capacity does not mean that an intervention hypothesizing a mechanism by which it is inducing the brain to generate these new neural pathways is in fact inducing the brain to generate new neural pathways.

So caution must be taken when assessing programs that present themselves as involving brain retraining as a treatment for serious illnesses. That includes the program called the Dynamic Neural Retraining System, which is based in Victoria, Canada. It has gained adherents in Canada and elsewhere.
https://www.virology.ws/2020/09/02/trial-by-error-what-is-the-dynamic-neural-retraining-system/
 
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Dan‘s ANS rewire programme and the optimum health clinic do similar things too. I think both are quite popular, unfortunately.
Truly the golden age of magical thinking. So damn embarrassing that it's mainly coming directly out of medicine itself. The future once promised universal education and science all-around. Instead we have this medieval crap straight out of fevered cocaine-powered dystopian nightmares.

Frankly medicine straight up believing in ghosts wouldn't even be any worse, this is maximal failure already. The idea that the autonomic nervous system can be rewired is so ludicrous on its face, it would be such a massive design flaw it would make survival impossible. Right up there with requiring conscious thought to breathe. It completely flies in the face of common sense about the solutions biology needs to come up with to promote survival.
 
I’m also pretty sure Curable was along these lines as well. There was a talk about rewiring your responses to pain at some point. The thing is though so many people do it / advocate for it. I follow an Instagram account for spoonies and the person in it did curable and she was talking about how great it was and how much it’s helped her and that she would recommend it as it’s after all only £60 a year and she’s spent countless money before on other things which didn’t help, so this is money well spent. I was so disappointed as up till now they hadn’t seemed like the kind of person who would be taken in by it.
 
The Lightning Process, which I have covered extensively, isn’t the only program out there making big assertions about its impact on how the brain functions.

Maybe not altogether on point but more of a counterpoint to the above quote:

He explained that, while neuroscientists have made progress in understanding how the brain controls movement, how it processes thoughts and memories is still a mystery.

The above quote is by a neuroscientist referring to Elon Musk's new computer chip implanted as a brain computer neuralink.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53987919

There are other similar quotes from other neuroscientists on the same theme regarding EM's computer chip interface. That is how very little is known about the brain.

Here for example:

Ahead of the webcast, Ari Benjamin, at the University of Pennsylvania's Kording Lab, had told BBC News the real stumbling block for the technology could be the sheer complexity of the human brain.

"Once they have the recordings, Neuralink will need to decode them and will someday hit the barrier that is our lack of basic understanding of how the brain works, no matter how many neurons they record from.

"Decoding goals and movement plans is hard when you don't understand the neural code in which those things are communicated."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53956683

When one reads advertising or so-called 'research' by various gurus and pysch types you'd think that it's all been made clear and sorted. They are quite positive and sure -- no mystery here. All has been revealed, so long as it's not questioned.
 
Just so Prof Crawley isn’t feeling left out, in some of her press interviews she suggests that with CFS biomedical problems associated with the brain can be corrected by her repertoire of behavioural interventions:

"A teenager might say, 'You are just trying to change my sleep', but do you know how much biology you actually change?

"Children who come to my clinic have low cortisol [stress hormone] levels in the morning, that is why they feel so terrible; by changing their sleep, we reverse that.

"The stuff we are doing is not a pill, but it might as well be."

see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-37822068

Unfortunately she only gives vague suggestions in press interviews but nothing more concrete in her research papers. This idea of using behavioural and psychological interventions to change brain functioning is not just found in alternative medicine but also in what claims to be mainstream medicine, though it terms of research method and reasoning in this field there is little to distinguish the two.
 
Beyond that, such programs can have generalized impacts unrelated to the content. For some, spending time in a group of like-minded people might have an ameliorative effect. In a 2013 critique of “brain retraining” programs like DNRS on the site Science-Based Medicine, Yale neurologist and professional skeptic Steven Novella noted the following: “Just doing something, anything, to address a chronic problem is likely to make someone feel better. In the case of “brain training” interventions, there are real cognitive benefits to the increased mental activity. The problem is the layer of pseudoscience placed on top of this legitimate but limited intervention.

Well put. The problem is the often absurdly exaggerated claims of efficacy and the pseudoscientific model that the proponents have constructed.

There is nothing wrong with focusing for example more on relaxation in your life, but when it's turned into some sort of cure-all technique for devastating diseases then it becomes harmful quackery.

BPS people should take this criticism to heart and stop trying to make-believe that this or that disease is caused by thoughts, social contagion, the stress of the pandemic or similar things. It makes them look foolish at best, or like fraudsters or even a case of untreated psychosis at worst. If BPS people can't see how absurd this is maybe they should consider that they are out of touch with how bad the diseases in question are. You don't give yourself cancer with the wrong thinking style and you also don't give yourself ME/CFS with the wrong thoughts.
 
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You don't give yourself cancer with the wrong thinking style

some would disagree with this, I think. Unfortunately.

During the worst of the AIDS epidemic in late 80s and early 90s, there were healers who were popular, and it was all about your power to effect your own healing. That's great, except people still kept getting sick and dying, and on top of that some also felt guilt as if they'd brought it on themselves by their failed self-healing efforts.
 
some would disagree with this, I think. Unfortunately.

During the worst of the AIDS epidemic in late 80s and early 90s, there were healers who were popular, and it was all about your power to effect your own healing. That's great, except people still kept getting sick and dying, and on top of that some also felt guilt as if they'd brought it on themselves by their failed self-healing efforts.

It's heartbreaking.

From what I've picked up, these healers became popular because they seemed to listen, care and understand when others didn't. It is so sad that this had to come along with the 'you can heal your life' message and the associated guilt. Why can't people just stop at listening and caring?

That's actually what annoys me about spiritual healer types - they could be offering genuine empathy and care but they refuse to do that and instead centre themselves by claiming they can 'heal' you (or show you how to 'heal yourself').
 
Thank you for turning your attention to this, David.

Unfortunately I've recently seen an upsurge in fellow ME patients wasting their money on DNRS and similar scam treatments. Hopefully your articles will prevent at least some from being duped in future.
 
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What also gets me about all of these 'treatments' is that ok, lets say they do actually retrain the brain not to alert you to certain stimuli (i dont think they do but lets just for a moment assume that it works - well nobody has proven that the signals it's currently sending, are faulty.

If you really can change the way the brain responds to things, you'd better make darn sure that the way it is currently responding is wrong, rather than simply unpleasant. Otherwise you might find yourself not being alerted to something to do actually need to be alerted to in future... If you train the brain that it is sending a pain signal when there is no reason to, then you teach it to ignore certain stimuli.... what if actually there is a reason for it to send that signal, but you train it not to send it and you then develop bone cancer or something but dont get any pain because you taught your brain not to send alert signals for pain in the joints (or whatever).
 
What also gets me about all of these 'treatments' is that ok, lets say they do actually retrain the brain not to alert you to certain stimuli (i dont think they do but lets just for a moment assume that it works - well nobody has proven that the signals it's currently sending, are faulty.

If you really can change the way the brain responds to things, you'd better make darn sure that the way it is currently responding is wrong, rather than simply unpleasant. Otherwise you might find yourself not being alerted to something to do actually need to be alerted to in future... If you train the brain that it is sending a pain signal when there is no reason to, then you teach it to ignore certain stimuli.... what if actually there is a reason for it to send that signal, but you train it not to send it and you then develop bone cancer or something but dont get any pain because you taught your brain not to send alert signals for pain in the joints (or whatever).
Quite. Like taking heavy duty pain killers so you don't feel if you've put your hand onto a cooker hotplate.
 
It would be interesting to know the history of some of these loopy ideas, and whether they originated from government funded research. There must be doubts about the provenance of the "neuro-linguistic programming " ideas leading to the Lightning Process. There were a lot of strange people involved in strange work.
 
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